Reeling in Facts for Striper Conservation

In his op-ed Conservation is Essential to Save the Striper (Vineyard Gazette, Oct. 31), author Dick Russell suggests that recreational and commercial fishermen stand at odds when it comes to striped bass conservation. He claims that commercial striped bass fishermen from Massachusetts and menhaden fishermen from Virginia are obstacles in the way of stronger protections for striped bass. To support these allegations, Mr. Russell makes several misleading claims regarding stripers, Atlantic menhaden, and the relationship between the two species.

Despite Mr. Russell’s bleak portrayal of the striped bass stock, the species is widely considered a management success story. Since the collapse of striper populations in the 1980s, the stock has experienced significant rebuilding, increasing from nine million fish in 1982 to over 70 million in 2004. But since 2006, managers have seen a consistent decline in spawning stock biomass and recruitment. This is understandably of concern to recreational fishermen like Mr. Russell, who account for a larger portion of the species’ harvest than the commercial sector. Now in light of recent assessment data, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is considering reductions in the striped bass quota.

Yet Mr. Russell distracts from this ongoing, science-based discussion to lay blame for this decline at the feet of the commercial menhaden fishery. This accusation of a causal link is not original and has been repeatedly disproven. He calls menhaden “the time-honored food of choice” for stripers, though scientists have previously dispelled this myth. In 2007, researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science investigated striped bass predation of menhaden in the Chesapeake Bay and found that menhaden represented only about eight per cent of the striped bass diet. Mr. Russell also claims that menhaden numbers have declined by 90 per cent — a statistic first popularized by the Pew Environment Group in 2012. But when Pulitzer Prize-winning group PolitiFact fact checked that figure, experts found that Pew had cherry picked data points that do not accurately represent the past or current status of the menhaden fishery. PolitiFact ultimately deemed their claim “mostly false.”

By linking the mid-Atlantic commercial menhaden fishery to an array of widespread issues across the coast, Mr. Russell ignores a long list of serious environmental conditions that demonstrably play a key role in striped bass and menhaden stock health. In his discussion of mycobacteriosis in the Chesapeake’s striped bass population, for example, Mr. Russell gives no mention to the Bay’s many environmental issues including habitat loss, pollution, contaminants from urban sprawl, changing water temperatures, increasing hypoxic zones, and invasive species.

An extensive study on striped bass populations — the result of years of research by Dr. Bob Wood, Director of NOAA’s Oxford Cooperative Laboratory in Maryland — recently shed new light on the menhaden-striper relationship. The species have cyclical but inverse patterns of high and low population levels. History shows that striped bass will experience several years of booming numbers, while menhaden simultaneously experience several years of reduced population levels, and then vice versa. According to Dr. Wood’s research, the key cause for these changes is a large-scale weather phenomenon named the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation, which brings periods of warmer waters (good for striped bass populations) followed by periods of cooler water (good for menhaden).

This research underscores multiple studies indicating that environmental conditions are the defining factor for these populations. Dr. Wood’s research has become the basis for what many believe is behind the current decline of striped bass. This type of careful analysis is an example of what is needed to achieve effective ecosystem-based protections.

Calls for conservation that use unfounded and anecdotal information and fail to consider environmental factors are based in faith, not science. Similarly, broad unfounded accusations against commercial sectors that portray these job-producing industries as antagonists versus recreational sectors are based in politics, not science.

Any productive discourse on the vital marine fisheries of both New England and the entire East Coast must be supported with factual evidence.

Robert B. Vanasse is executive director of Saving Seafood and Menhaden Fisheries Coalition in Washington, D.C.

Comments (2)

Wendelin Giebel, Long Island

The menhaden population along the east coast has been fished down to less than 1% of its unfished biomass. I spent over a week moving down the Chesapeake from Annapolis MD, to Beaufort NC at five knots. I didn't see a single school of adult bunker on the surface anytime during the trip. I had a good pair of binoculars and forty years of experience locating bunker schools from a deck in light air. The reason the bass had only 8 percent of their stomach contents made up of menhaden is because there are little bunker for them to be feeding on. The same holds true for the Long Island Sound and it's tributaries. The bunker that makes the heart of our food web along the east coast is being pressed and ground and exported to China and Japan at absurdly low price and being ground up to feed 250 million dogs and cats in this country. None of the purposes for destroying our marine food web are required as all the constituent parts of the menhaden rendering have alternative sources not derived from wild caught fish. As for the labeling as false the Pew comment on an 85% decrease in the menhaden population in recent years..... If you read the analysis done by the fact check group you soon realize that an enormous decline is not at issue but simply is it an 85% decline, a 65% or a 76% decline.... The fact is the menhaden stock has been nearly fished into oblivion when compared to what any sane biologist would call sound management. The stock should be rebuilt to over 50% of its unfished biomass if anybody along the east coast expects to see a heathy ecosystem here with a full compliment of animals dependent upon menhaden and ....if you are eating seafood caught on the east coast of the United States, you eating menhaden . They are all dependent on menhaden!

Both populations, striped bass and and menhaden are now controlled by the ASMFC catch regulations. Attributing the size of these stocks to weather patterns or currents is absurd. Blaming weather and currents shifts the blame away from catch quotas and reduction of menhaden. The menhaden reduction industry knows that their survival and future is hanging in the balance now, as the cat is out of the bag. No bunker= no bass . Grinding and pressing the heart of our east coast food web into fish feed pellets for global export is the mission of the reduction industry. The industry has full time employees who search the internet sites to constantly inject disinformation, junk science and blame designed to move the argument away from their industry and ecocidal menhaden management by ASMFC. The bass , bluefish, weakfish, sharks, tuna, whales , seals , ospreys , and just about every meat eater in the food web here needs the menhaden. Cats pigs, chickens and dogs can eat farm reared protein. There is no mandate that these feeds be full of wild caught fish. Our food web has been ravaged by menhaden reduction and there is no fix on the horizon.